Apocalypse Night
by CDS
Summary: Mulder and Scully discover a terrifying connection between a series of random shootings


The characters and situations are the creations and property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and the Fox Broadcasting Corporation and have been used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended and no money shall be made with this piece of fiction.

* * *

The X-Files

ApocalypseNight

Prologue

**Greendale High School**   
**Greendale, Wisconsin**   
**12:47PM**

Karl Tizonik had dated Rachel Kuklinski briefly when they'd been in high school. They'd been sophomores, he though, or maybe juniors. Didn't matter. That time was inaccessible to him now as the date of his birth, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Big Bang-just another historical date whose ramifications could be felt, even if the era and epoch could be known only academically. Tizonik had already thrown up everything in his digestive tract down to the bile, and now knew the only concession left to this day was the chilly, despairing knowledge that these hallways, this building of cubist segments grafted together, would never again be a place he could lay claim to on behalf of his youth and formation. It was, after today, a haunted house. 

Rachel and his relationship-if it could even be considered such-was a brief immature thing, and they'd both ended up having a dozen other like it before marrying their respective spouses. Rachel had married a fullback from Greenfield High School's football team who'd picked up a degree from UW Milwaukee and gone to work for a nearby Ford Dealership. They had three children. Two sons, now in college, and a seventeen year-old daughter Jennifer. Hazarding a look at her once more, Tizonik was again shaken at how much Jennifer resembled her mother at that age-even with half her skull blown off onto the wall behind her. 

"Rope it all off," Chief Brunk was saying to no one in particular, his eyes holding a faraway look that indicated that he, too, had finished throwing up and was moving into detached mode. He'd given this same order three times already, and it was common sense anyway. Tizonik hitched up his heavy Sam Browne belt, felt the strain of the equipment it carried-gun, cuffs, baton, flashlight, mace, keys, reloads-and felt a furious flush of inadequacy run through him. All of this and the three little bastards had aced each other before the first squad car could show up. 

Not that they hadn't done damage in the fifteen or so minutes that they'd been shooting. They'd opened up on the front lawn, just south of the wide parking lot where the yellow school buses were still disgorging their occupants, and where the survivors and witnesses were huddled in interlocking clusters weeping and trembling. Their assault had come from three directions-a triangular crossfire-and was devastatingly effective, due primarily to the weapons they'd packed. Dale Miskiff had carried a Tec-9 semi-auto machine pistol. He'd brought along three 30-round clips of Black Talon expanding bullets. 

Lonnie Kasperzak had wielded a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. Probably one he'd used when he went hunting in Canada with his dad and some of his dad's buddies from the Department of Public Works. At close range, with clustered targets, the buckshot had made hamburger out of the first victims. Pieces of them were still scattered around the main lawn, gory red on intense green surrounded by vivid yellow crime scene tape. 

Chris Kowaleski had brought up the rear with a Glock-17. He'd stuffed his pockets with over a dozen clips loaded with the same Black Talons as Dale's Tec-9. All in all, they'd had more firepower among them than three Greendale PD units. 

When the crowds on the lawn had disbursed like leaves in a whirlwind-many through a blanket of lead being sprayed by one of the shooters-the three had scrambled into the main entrance of the high school and continued their assault. There was no rhyme or reason this time. Eyewitness accounts-the ones that could be elicited-had them bounding down the halls jeering and whooping like kids playing army and firing at anyone they saw. One of those people had been Jennifer Kuklinski. They'd stopped only when they heard the sirens. Then, again according to semi-reliable eyewitness accounts, they'd exchanged quick looks and turned on each other as savagely as dogs fighting for a scrap of meat. 

And it had happened in this upper-middle class suburb of Milwaukee where people mostly knew one another from school functions or Saint Alphonsus Parish functions. Tizonik felt the world falling away around him as if , on this day, he'd learned that all his life was a lie. 

Brunk was still giving orders to himself, but no one was paying attention. They were already moving to push back the reporters and preserving things as best as possible for the Milwaukee Chief Medical Examiner and the local FBI agents. Pretty screwed-up that last one, Tizonik thought, since one agent had been here already, and one was still lingering like the Angel of Death in a dark suit and black overcoat. These two had been from Washington, but didn't seem to know of one another. Christ, didn't the Feds even know what their own guys were doing? The first one was more shabbily-dressed, and Tizonik wondered if this guy was on the take. 

Right now, the guy was leaning against a tree looking contemplatively at the school. He dressed like a fed, but didn't much look like one-not the way Tizonik always thought they'd look. This guy looked hangdog and slightly depressed. Tizonik sauntered up to him, gently nudging past crying, wracking circles of embraced teens. He paid them no mind, because he was sick of recognizing his friends' kids. 

"Thinking anything that might help us, there?" he asked the Fed. A flash, a glimmer of recognition, and the guy's green eyes came to focus on him. 

"Just thinking about that last FBI agent that was here. The one you described to me. Maybe he knows something." The guy's voice didn't give anything away. 

Tizonik shifted uncomfortably, hitched up his belt again. "He said he was some kind of a statistician. Doin' a study. Still, I don't know what he could figure out that'd explain something like this. I mean-" he thought of Rachel Kuklinski in her cheerleader uniform, her daughter slumped against a wall with her brains blown out, saw the images merge, and choked back a lump in his throat. 

"I'm not sure what would be worse: the explanation or leaving it unexplained." 

Tizonik didn't know what the guy meant, but he was too busy fighting back the tears to care. Something in his mind had ripped loose and he was losing control quickly, the foundation of the world slipping away from beneath him. 

After today, nothing would ever make sense.   


1

**NorVex Pharmaceuticals**   
**Washington D.C.**   
**5:42 PM**

_"Stay down and keep quiet! Keep on the phone with the 911 operator and don't come out until someone with a badge tells you to!"_

Staci Delaney nodded dumbly, her eyes filled with animal fear. She was a completely malleable subject now, Dana Scully knew. Fear was the ultimate controlling agent. 

From behind her and down the corporate-generic hallway came more staccato pops. The war they resounded through the warren of cubicles made Scully imagine the gun as a big-bore-.40 or .45 caliber. 

"Dana, you can't-" 

She shrugged away from Staci's outstretched hands and thrust a wide, office telephone into her hands. "Remember what I said," Scully said again and pulled away. She darted to the edge of the hallway and drew her Sig/Saur P-228 and cocked it. What Saint did she have to thank for giving her the presence of mind to bring her sidearm along on what was supposed to be a girl's night out? When this ended, she'd have to ask Father O'Connor. 

More shots from down the hallway. Things shattering and choking screams. Definitely a big-bore. That could be good or bad. A big hole in a small body would kill them almost instantly. On the other hand, it was less prone to pinball around the inside of the body, so the injuries would be more straightforward... 

Scully pulled her mind out of Doctor Mode. No medical attention could help the injured if the gunman was still active. She forced herself back to the Academy, to Quantico, and the shooting simulations at Hogan's Alley. 

Big Bore. No more than ten shots most likely. Less if it's a .45 auto. The shooter probably had a stock of clips, though. These kinds always did. 

She stepped out of her Nine West pumps and padded down the hallway noticing in a brief, surreal moment, that her thigh-highs were nearly the same shade of maroon as the office's carpeting. She padded further down the hall. 

_Offices on either side. He's not in there. The hallway opens into another reception/waiting area. He's there. Access to unlocked doors, stairways, elevators..._

Scully kept the gun in a stiff-armed grip, but not pointing ahead. She remembered grizzled, veteran Rangemasters at Quantico lecturing at length about the danger of tunnel-vision that develops in combat situations. 

Two more shots nearly made her jump out of her skin they were so loud. She was close enough to hear the spent brass tinkle on the tile floors of the receptionist island. 

He must be shooting beneath the desks. 

Another scream. 

A thundering shot. 

Scully took a deep breath through her nostrils, then pivoted out of the hallway and into the wide, open waiting area. It was sterile and soulless, almost an afterthought for a corporation whose most critical interactions took place in board rooms and who ushered their most important clients in through entranced from the heliport. 

The shooter was in the center of the reception island, inside the counter top perimeter and surrounded by flat computer screens, now bleeding smoke. He was so relentlessly average he was almost terrifying-perhaps six-foot, brownish hair, a muscular thickening and going to flab beneath a rumpled suit. 

And clutched in one big hand was a silver automatic. 

Smith&Wesson, Scully guessed, she'd used one herself briefly. That meant a .40-caliber and upwards of ten shots. 

The shooter was shouting, an insanity-tinged voice that emerged somewhere between a cackle and a sob. _"Is this what you want? What you wanted? Huh? Is it?"_

Another explosion. A computer screen toppled in a mess of shattered plastic over the ragged hole the bullet tore in the desktop. 

If someone was hiding under there like Staci was hiding beneath her desk... 

_"Here it is! Here it is! You like it? You fucking like it, all you fuckin' life-sucking bitches?"_

Scully lunged, gun held in front of her. The white dot of the front blade aligned between the edges of the back trench. 

_"Don't move!"_ she shouted, not bothering with any unnecessary words. The shooter spun, and Scully could even see the redness in his eyes. The gun rose. Scully fired once, saw the red hole blossom like a rose on the man's shoulder. His arm dropped, the tendons severed, but his left arm lashed out. Scully fired again, saw her bullet rip away a chunk of his collarbone, and only too late noticed the canister skittering along the perimeter of the reception island. 

Without thinking, she brought her arms to shield her face and threw her legs out from under her. Still, the flash touched her eyes like a sunburst and she felt a hot wind tousle her hair like the affectionate gesture of a lover. 

Scully had only a moment to regret the lack of lovers in her life, and then the wall hit her and took everything away.   


3

**35,000 feet over Ohio**   
**6:27PM (EST)**

Mulder reached again for his Nokia only to feel the empty spot at his armpit. Again. He ground his teeth, shuddered in his seat, and mentally strangled the flight attendant who'd taken it from him. Kyle, his name was. Skinny, effeminate Kyle who'd become downright _snippy_ when Mulder had repeatedly tried to phone Skinner, Mercy of Angels hospital, anyone who might be able to tell him something about Scully's condition. Something beyond the terse, charcoal message Skinner had left with Mulder's voice-mail. 

_"Agent Scully's been involved in a shooting incident. She's currently recovering at Mercy of Angels. I suggest you get your ass back here now, Agent Mulder, before I personally fly out there and kick it all the goddamn way back here like a soccer ball."_

Mulder wanted to kick his way out of this row-three people abreast with his seat closest to the window and the least accessible to the aisle-and pace the plane frantically. Better yet take the plane at gunpoint and establish radio contact with Mercy of Angels and maybe throw Kyle out of a landing gear door. 

Damn. Scully. 

Mulder felt his stomach twist as it always did when he knew that she was in danger. He still had no vocabulary to define their relationship, or even what she meant to him. _Friend, partner, lover..._ none of those words or terms seemed to have the appropriate meaning. At a visceral level, he thought of Scully more like an arm, a lung, a lobe of his brain. The entity he felt was best was comprised of her and him and to lose her stirred in him a feeling of impending doom, or personal apocalypse as if the loss of her would also bring his personal destruction. And, he thought, perhaps it would. 

_...involved in a shooting..._

And, of course, the shooting had already been getting coverage when Mulder had grabbed his tickets, playing over the various TV sets installed in Mitchell International's concourses. He hadn't paid much attention at first-too busy thinking black thoughts about the bastard at HQ who wouldn't authorize a Bubird to get him to DC ASAP. But after fifteen minutes or so, the battering-ram news coverage had finally penetrated his dark musings. It was the kind of frantic, nearly orgasmic media frenzy that typically accompanied such outbursts. It would burn white-hot for a day, perhaps two at the outside, but then die away to become little more than reference for the next one. This was a boring one by '90s news standards, just another employee, disgruntled over being let go who came back to the office packing heat. Happened all the time. Certainly nothing on par with the Greendale High School shootings. 

He leaned against the smudged plastic of the window, tried to see the splashing of lights far below, but couldn't. All there was was the silver/black cloud cover typical of mid-October. 

The man had been at this scene. He'd been at the scene of the shooting posing as FBI (or maybe he _was_ FBI), cataloging and recording, and then disappearing again. Until the next scene of random, senseless violence. 

Mulder had his teeth in something this time, he _knew_ it. He should have told Scully. He should have told Skinner. And now his entire support system had been toppled from beneath him. 

He checked his watch, thumped his head against the window, caught Kyle's disapproving gaze and matched it with a murderous look. Kyle scuttled away and Mulder went back to his thoughts of bodies, senseless acts of viciousness and the person who meant most to him, laid out in a hospital bed in a city on the edge of a nation that tonight seemed to be tumbling toward madness.   


4

**Mercy of Angels Hospital**   
**Washington D.C.**   
**9:19PM**

Mulder looked at the figure in the bed before him, hardwired to monitors and surrounded by machines, and he thought again about how minimalizing hospitals tended to be. They reduced the mystery of living into base components and processes as unglamourous and banal as an auto parts yard. In the shadow of that indignity, how could anyone be other than minimized? 

Scully looked crumpled and pale, her natural fair complexion seeming the blend with that of the hospital gown and the sheets. It made the cuts on her cheeks and neck seem more vivid and furious than he suspected they were. 

He gently brushed away a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair (even that seemed to have been drained of color) and looked over his shoulder at Skinner, who stood in the doorway of the glassed-in recovery room like a bleached-bone chess piece. "She's been out how long?" 

"Since they brought her in," he answered in his characteristic tone-a murmur with the undertone of violence. "She regained consciousness briefly after being admitted. They gave her a head CT, MRI, didn't find anything. They patched her up and admitted her for observation. Let her sleep it off." 

"Good thing she doesn't have an HMO." 

"Close proximity to an explosion, they don't stop to check your insurance." 

Mulder looked from Scully's peaceful, unconscious form to Skinner's contained, but agitated one. "What do we have on the shooter?" 

"Why do you ask, Agent Mulder?" Skinner's voice was arid. 

"She's my partner," Mulder shot back. "Someone tried to blow her into the Potomac with a pipe bomb after he got bored shooting up his former workplace..." 

"And where were you?" Skinner demanded, his tone dropping. "Way the hell out in Wisconsin for a case that doesn't exist." 

Mulder felt his stomach lurch. He opened his mouth, but Skinner cut him off. "Yeah, I checked it out. File Number One-three-oh-seven was closed down two months ago. You lied on your travel expense requisition. I want to know why. And why I shouldn't sic OPR on your ass." 

He held Skinner's gaze and asked: "What's our involvement in the investigation?" 

"Answer my question, Agent Mulder." 

"What's our involvement?" 

Skinner lunged without even seeming to move, his hands were suddenly clamped on the edge of Scully's bed, his head, bald as .45 ACP slug thrust forward and glaring like demon's visage. "Goddamn it, Mulder!" he snarled. "This isn't a joke!" 

"Six shootings in two months," Mulder replied, fighting to keep his voice from rising. "Three schools, two offices, and church. What's the Bureau's involvement? I need to know." 

Skinner's scalding gaze lessened in intensity only slightly, but he answered anyway. "The Bureau is involved in an After-the-Fact capacity as a fact-finding agent for the Unified Crime Report. Why?" 

"The Unified Crime Report compiles information," Mulder said. "They don't send agents to the scene." 

"No, they've got statisticians, analysts..." 

"Except in every one of these shootings, police reported agents at the scene. Usually one, sometimes two. The same one, I think, in every case. The physical descriptions are the same." 

"Agents at the scene?" 

"Within hours." 

"They're not from the local Field Offices?" 

"They identify themselves as being a part of a section assigned to investigate the incidents." 

Skinner backed off a few inches. "There's no such section." 

"Then who are they?" 

Skinner didn't answer. Mulder looked back down at Scully's inert form.   


5

_So here we are, Scully, a world tumbling toward the next thousand years and we face it not with dignity, awe, or wonder; not with a sense of self-congratulation over the enormous strides we've made as a species in medicine, science, communication, or justice; not with a reproachful eye toward our continuing faults and shortcomings; not even with an inflated, irrational sense of our own nebulous destruction. We step to the threshold without anything._

_It has been an exhausting century. In this hundred-years we've twice witnessed ideology betray its underpinnings of insanity and blossom into a violence that burned hot enough to engulf most of the world. We have seen the old order that existed without challenge since the last millennium swept away as easily as ashes in wind. We have seen an explosion in knowledge and technology at a rate never before witnessed in human history. We tore apart the atom and harnessed its power, created generators that could power entire cities, and bombs that could level those same cities. As a species, we grabbed the arms of our chairs and held on as these discoveries hurtled us into debate, conjecture, and contention over the morality and safety of this technology._

_But now the missiles are being dismantled, and the power plants are growing silent and cold as they are abandoned, and it's hard not to feel as if those debates, those battles, were all for nothing. If there is to be an epitaph for this century, maybe that should be it: All for nothing._

_In Europe, splinter factions of political parties fought in streets-communists, socialists, democrats, social democrats, national socialists, all going at each other with clubs and knives and guns, blissfully unaware that in a scant two or three decades their ideologies would be moot and in five, they'd be obsolete and the stuff of history exams in college courses nobody takes, because nobody cares about them anyway._

_Fifty years of the Cold War and the whole thing ended not in the flames of a war that would spread across the world and die only when the last nuclear missile impacted the ash and glass that we'd made of the planet, but in the blinding splendor signs advertising Nike, Absolut, Guess?, and Marlboro. A half-century we prepared for the war that would define the future, and in the end it was fought and won not by West Point and the Pentagon, but by Wall Street and Fifth Avenue. Billions of dollars worth of bombers, tanks, rifles, and all it took was blue jeans and cellular phones._

_And so with our wars fought bloodlessly and won costlessly, with our economy booming as the world attempts to emulate us all, we hunker down in our living rooms and watch _Friends_ to see what Ross is going to do about Rachel this week and whether or not Chandler and Monica's relationship is going to last, content that all is well within out scope of vision._

_But I fear, I fear, I fear, Scully. There's something going on beyond what the can see-or perhaps it's there before us and we simply miss it. This ride isn't pay-as-you-go. The toll get's collected at the end, and we're rapidly approaching that point. And there is a destination. I have an inkling of what it may be, and it scares the hell out of me, Scully._

_I wish you'd wake up. I hate being scared and alone._   


6

"Sorry, I didn't realize..." the doctor broke off and took an unsteady step toward the door. Mulder watched him between his fingers. He took his hands away from his face, unashamed that the doctor had walked in on his monologue to Scully. 

"How is she?" 

The doctor stopped, unprepared for the question. He took another step backward, then turned when he ran into Skinner's frame which suddenly filled the doorway. 

"She's fine," he said quickly, his head whipping back and forth between Mulder and Skinner. "No, she's okay. Uh...we'll of course, um, hold her to ensure that there's no cerebral bruising we may have missed, but all her test results came out fine." 

"How about the shooter?" Skinner growled. 

"Well," the doctor adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. Mulder thought he looked more like a stock broker than a doctor with none of the hangdog haggardness of thirty-hour shifts etched beneath his eyes. "I think...physically, he's okay. We patched him up. We're just running some tests..." 

"What kind of tests?" Mulder asked, his curiosity piqued. 

"Ah, some brain-scans, some MRIs..." 

"I want copies of all those tests," Skinner said. "And I want to know the moment the shooter becomes conscious. And I mean the _moment_ his eyelids so much as twitch." 

"Yeah..." said the doctor, nodding. "Sure. I'll make a note of it on his chart and leave standing orders with the ICU staff..." 

"No press gets in." 

"Without question, yeah." 

"All right." Skinner stood aside, and the doctor sidled past. He was wearing khakis and a maroon pullover Mulder noticed. 

"Packing it in?" he asked. 

"I'm sorry?" 

Mulder made a vague gesture indicating the man's clothing. 

"Oh, yeah. Ten minutes left." 

"Have a pleasant evening, Doctor..." 

Mulder and Skinner looked at him expectantly. 

"Oh. Sorry. DeVries." 

"Then have a good evening Doctor DeVries," Skinner said quietly. DeVries nodded and slipped out. For a moment, they just regarded Scully's form beneath her covers in the dim light of the room, then Skinner asked: 

"What did he come in here for?"   


7

DeVries wondered if he should have given them his name. Didn't matter, he guessed, they had bigger concerns and those concerns would get even bigger once Mister Colby regained consciousness. He moved quickly, walking at a brisk pace--not uncommon in a hospital, so it didn't attract attention-and ducked out a side door, camouflaged by a delivery of sterile gauze pads. 

The night was cool and damp, like slipping into a wet woolen sweater. He jogged across the slick pavement, glittering under the street lights, his steps unsteady as his loafers lost purchase in places. Traffic was light and he jaywalked, then turned a corner and jogged halfway down the empty block. This was all retail and rental here. The all-night coffee shops and diners that catered to the hospital staff were on the blocks off the opposite end of Mercy. 

DeVries stopped at the doorway to an empty check-chasing shop and pushed. Despite the safety gate and numerous security system stickers, the door opened easily, and DeVries walked into the darkened room. At the opposite end, he knew, there was a counter encased in bullet-proof glass. He'd seen the place a few times during the day, when it was in full swing cutting money orders and facilitating the transformation of the weekly wage of various deadbeats and reprobates from a printed check to whatever swill they'd use to wage war against their livers. 

"Well?" the voice came from anywhere, and DeVries knew better than to look for the man. He'd caught a glimpse of Damrosch once, in the headlights of a car making a turn near the dark corner of the park where they'd been meeting. The man was tall and lean with a latent energy like a bow stretched taunt on the verge of being released. His long, aquiline face was topped with dark hair, receding at the temples, and slicked back. The man was positively lupine. DeVries hadn't seen his eyes and was glad he hadn't. He was having enough trouble sleeping these days. 

"The tests came out like we expected. It was tricky-we had to put him back under before anyone knew that we'd done the behavioral analysis-but your guys helped a lot. Even the real FBI was fooled." 

"No one knows you conducted the tests?" 

"Nope. Far as anyone official knows, Colby's been unconscious since Agent Scully shot him. There've been enough other casualties from the building to keep everybody busy. On top of that there was a pile-up on the-" 

"We're aware of that," Damrosch said brusquely, and DeVries felt his blood turn to ice. Would these people really arrange for a gasoline truck to jack-knife in the middle of traffic just to create a diversion? 

But long ago he'd decided not wonder these things. Not to ask questions he didn't want to know the answers to. 

So what was he doing involved in this study? 

"You have the results?" 

"Yeah. I faxed copies to the rest of the team. I have the originals here." 

"Put them on the counter." 

DeVries stepped forward and put the manilla file down on the counter by the bulletproof glass. He realized then that Damrosch was in front of the glass and not behind it. The man was outlined in the red lights of various sleeping computer systems. 

"Good work," Damrosch said, "but I'm afraid your funding's been cut." 

Only then did DeVries notice the other man's outstretched arm. His brain made the leap to what was happening just milliseconds before the nine-millimeter jacketed hollow-point round shattered the right lens of his glasses and blew out the back of his skull.   


8

**1617 Wisconsin Avenue**   
**Seventh Floor**   
**Offices of Next Phase Think Tank**   
**11:55PM**

"I think it's obvious Don isn't going to be joining us," Martha Daindridge said, idly tapping her gold pen against the leather organizer that sat on the polished mahogany table they sat around. She loved that pen, Jacques thought with a black, bolt of resentment. She'd gotten it as a gift from a private foundation that funded a variety of pet causes, and Martha was a particularly good candidate to give an award to. A black woman. Who better upon which to bestow meaningless accolades, and by proxy dispel your reputation as an Old White Guy's club? For her part, Martha had barely contributed anything of substantive value to this study. Some background material to produce a baseline standard. Hell, that was kid stuff. Not like sitting in one concrete cell after another with some fucking lunatic maniac killer on the other end just bursting to tell you his story in gory detail. That had Tim Jacques's contribution to the project. 

"Well, we have his data," Janine Claymore said authoritatively, like the Project Director she wasn't. "Everyone's had an opportunity to review it. I think we can at least consider some recommendations." 

"I'm not sure it's proper for us to be considering courses of action without the entire group present," Dan Kilmore commented. "Particularly the ones that we're now considering." 

"I didn't hear anything put on the table yet," Ashley Laurence sniped combatatively. 

"Oh, come on! You know what we're talking about, here!" John Grier said unsteadily. He reeked of smoke and Jacques laid odds that he'd light up before the end of the meeting. 

"Well we dragged our asses out here this late," Jacques commented. "We might as well get something done." 

"Yes," said Dave Gray, the Project Director Janine Claymore wished she was. "We know why we're here. We know what we're talking about. The question posed to us right now is simply: yes or no." 

"I don't feel it's quite that simple a choice," Martha interjected. "We're on the precipice of something remarkable. To simply reduce it to binary decision..." 

"We're not talking about saving the world," Jacques interrupted. "We're talking about breaking from our clients." 

"These aren't ordinary clients," Janine pointed out. "Whoever they are, they can even circumvent the FBI. We're not exactly talking Soloman Brothers here." 

"Plus a heavy retainer," Kilmore added. 

"Christ!" Grier gasped. "I can't believe it! We're sitting on the edge of fucking anarchy and you people are talking about _retainers?_ You people fucking amaze me." 

"Oh, don't be so melodramatic," Ashley griped. 

"This isn't melodrama..." 

"And please watch your language," Gray said mildly. 

"You people-" Grier sputtered, lost words, then stormed out, probably, Jacques thought, to suck down a Merit. 

"Well, now that we got John's obligatory temper tantrum out of the way..." Ashley muttered. 

"Ms. Laurence," Grey chastised gently. 

"Look, let's get to this," Jacques said and sat forward. "We break with our clients, we have to decide what to do with the knowledge. Do we go to the press? The scientific community? Oprah? What?" 

"Well, I think Oprah's out," Kilmore jibed. "Unless we publish our results." 

Janine waggled her plastic Bic. "We're only at the very early stages of research. Our results and findings have to be pored over and replicated dozens of times before its legitimacy can be accepted as fact or anything near it." 

"She's right," Ashley said. "We can't go public with this without looking like alarmists and incompetents. A radical group whose results are questionable and whose professionalism is non-existent." 

"We have a moral responsibility to the general public, nee the _world_..." Martha reminded them She was slipping into orator mode, and Jacques wanted to head that train off fast. 

"Look, it's lose/lose," he said. "We break with our clients and we look unprofessional, unethical, and that taints whatever credibility we have. Aside from getting our asses sued. And our results are controversial at best anyhow. Let's stay with the clients and abide by their wishes. If some employee were to leak our results to certain elements of the scientific community, then we can start research into these results through varying and public means. We get the ball rolling." 

"It seems to me," Grey said, shifting his thick bulk on his seat, "that an employee who leaks this information is taking a considerable risk and should have sufficient contacts within the scientific community to ensure that the leak is not traced back to us, otherwise that employee would be on their own." 

Jacques met his gaze. "That's the way I see it." 

"All right then," Grey clapped his hands together, then placed them on the table. "I think that's settled. Well..." he was cut off by the bleating of his cell phone. He answered it, gave an affirmative response, then closed it and returned it to the pocket of his still-unwrinkled suit. 

"We've got other concerns," he said. "The FBI agent has regained consciousness." 

"I wonder what she knows," Jacques commented.   


9

**Mercy of Angels Hospital**   
**1:05 AM**

"How's Staci?" Dana Scully asked groggily, her head still absently swiveling on the column of her neck as if she'd just stepped out of a prison cell into freedom and sunlight. 

"She's fine," Mulder said, not suppressing his grin. He leaned over from the corner of the bed where he sat and shouldered her gamely. "She's probably at home in bed now. The cops interviewed her and there was one of those disposable grief counselors hanging around-she probably had a talk with him. You're the one I'm worried about." He'd been at the crime scene, interviewing the DC cops when Skinner had phoned with the news that Scully was awake. The cops had IDed the same FBI agent as having shown up after the shooting taking interviews. They were quick this time, Mulder had mused as he broke any number of traffic regulations to get to the hospital, maybe DC was their home base... 

Scully blinked a few times, managed to focus on Mulder, then on Skinner at the doorway, and said, "I'm fine. Think I'll be sore tomorrow, but I'm fine. What-" 

"Pipe bomb," Skinner answered. "Crudely made. Looks like there was more concussion than shrapnel. Knocked both of you out. Shooter's recovering in ICU under twenty-four hour guard by the D.C.PD and the US Marshals. You did a good job, Agent Scully. You brought him down." 

Scully blinked a few times, then nodded affirmative. Skinner was canny enough to know when he was useless, and savvy enough to make his exit clean and not awkward. "I'll let you get some sleep. I'll be back tomorrow, we can discuss your after-action reports." Then he turned his cold gaze to Mulder. "Agent Mulder, we'll get back to your travel expenditures later." 

"Yes sir," Mulder nodded. Skinner held his look for a few moments longer-a few moments that promised the issue was far from resolved, then slid out the doorway and was gone. 

Scully looked up at him with huge, blue, puffy eyes. She looked almost cartoonish, and Mulder had to force down a laugh at the incongruity of the gravity of her tone. 

"What's he talking about, Mulder? Where were you?" 

"The usual. On a snipe hunt," Mulder sat deeper on the edge of her bed. As he did so, the manilla file he'd been carrying since he heard of Scully's regaining consciousness slid out of his fingers. He groped for it numbly a few times as the folder opened in mid-air like a tan butterfly and released most of its contents onto the valley made in the blankets by Scully's legs. Mulder swore under his breath and began gathering them up. 

"You'll have to trust me when I tell you that I'm not just copping a quick feel here." 

"They tell me you were in here while I was unconscious, Mulder. I'm just trying not to think about it." She sat forward and helped him gather up the papers. 

"Skinner was here to chaperone. You know, I could make a remark about what happens when you opt top stay home and have a social life rather than accompany me on unauthorized, unofficial assignments..." 

"Mulder, what's going on here?" Scully interrupted. 

Mulder leaned over and plucked the file folder from where it had gotten stuck between a set of springs on the hospital bed. "It's a long story, Scully. I don't want to bore you with it. Get some rest, I'll tell you tomorrow." 

"Tell me now, Mulder," she ordered. He looked at her, caught the apprehension in her gaze. She held up a sheet of paper-an identikit picture of one of the supposed FBI agents who showed up after the shootings. "This man is one of my doctors."   


10

**Mercy of Angels Hospital**   
**1:40 AM**

Grier went through the motions well-better than anyone else could, barring Don DeVries who actually was a doctor. John Grier had done a residency at Beth Israel Hospital in New York before the moral and intellectual stress had gotten to him. Still, he could feign a doctor well enough for their purposes-as well as Tim Jacques played an FBI man. 

He knew how to stride with ease and confidence and just the barest hint of exhaustion and world-weariness. Flipping through the charts to keep anyone from noticing an unfamiliar face, which would arouse suspicion (despite the fact that the credentials their clients provided them had been, thus far, airtight), Grier mentally rehearsed what he would say to the FBI woman. She was a tough cookie. She could grill him, ask him questions he didn't have the answers to, and she was a doctor, too. There was a high potential for this going wrong. He'd have to be quick and surgical (so to speak). 

_Blah blah blah...so did the gunman say anything to you before he threw the bomb? Just curious. I always wondered if it happens like it does in the movies: 'You'll never take me alive coppers!'_

The last bit needed some work, but it'd sound better spontaneous anyway. 

_...Uh huh...he said_______? How strange? Any idea what that means? Is that common in your FBI experience? I mean, do people often say things like that in violent situations? Huh. You don't say..._ and so on and so forth. 

Truth was, though, all of this was superfluous. They had their findings, and the mid-occurrence ramblings of one Subject wasn't going to affect them any. In this case, it would almost certainly support them. 

The findings. Grier had never been a man who easily used euphemisms, and yet here he was employing the ultimate euphemism: _The Findings._ Because _The Chaotic End to Everything_ just didn't have the right academic ring to it... 

Grier took a breath and opened the door to the FBI woman's room. The lights were on, which made things easier. He didn't have to rely on the contingency excuse for waking her up (which was, he had to admit, pretty thin). 

"Okay, Agent Scully," he said, employing the tone that matched the walk-same matter-of-fact bluntness, same weariness, "I just have a couple questions for you." 

Something hard and cold pressed against the back of his skull. 

And then there was the double click, like a finger being broken at the knuckles. 

"What a coincidence," a man's voice came from behind him. "We have a few questions for you, too." 

Over the chart he saw the FBI woman, Scully, thrusting the covers aside. She was dressed and holding a gun. 

Grier dropped the charts and concentrated on remaining continent.   


11

"It...It's back here. It's in the alley, see..." the doctor looked about ready to shudder out of his skin, but his speech, at least, was still coherent, and Scully took that as a good sign. She herself was still sore and exhaustion pulled at her like a thousand separate cat claws embedded in her flesh, but there was also the rush of adrenaline and the importance of what Mulder had told her. 

A connection between the shootings. 

Random acts of violence that, perhaps, weren't random at all. 

"You parked in an alley, Doc?" Mulder asked rudely as he gave the man a slight shove with his left hand. His pistol was still leveled at Doctor Grier's lumbar region, as was Scully's own Walther PPK/s off-duty piece. "Here, I thought one of the perks of being a doctor was the primo parking spaces." 

"I told you," Grier sputtered, "I'm not a _doctor!_ I had some med school training, that's all. I can act the part, but I don't really..." 

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, all for the study," Mulder interrupted. "The study of what? What, Doc?" 

Scully remembered that her gun hadn't been cocked since she fished it out of her purse after Mulder's explanation, and they'd agreed upon a hastily hatched plan. She jacked the slide and chambered the first of seven .380 ACP rounds. It wasn't very powerful (James Bond really needed to trade his in, she thought), but at this range it'd shatter Grier's spine neatly enough. 

And the sound was enough to cause Grier's skinny body to tremble like a plucked guitar string. 

"I can't explain...we need to get to my car. I have all the...I just can't explain..." 

They crossed the vast, largely-empty parking lot, and reached a chain-link fence that abutted the brick rear wall of another city block. Grier gripped the links, started to pull the door set into the fence, then stopped as if the effort was too great for him. 

"It's the killings. The shootings. The...you know it's been going on for years now. High schools, colleges, offices...People go insane and start shooting, but you see-you have to understand this part-there is _a quantifiable start date!_" Grier turned to them, his face shiny with sweat, and his red-rimmed eyes dancing manically. Scully hazarded a sidelong-glance that was answered by Mulder's: _Are we losing this guy?_

"A quantifiable start date!" Grier continued. "A phenomenon. It can be studied!" 

"Like any clinical disorder or behavioral occurrence," Scully said. 

"Yes!" Grier hopped a little bit. "Yes, and that what we began to find. Patterns...and dates...and...behavioral signposts. We're on the verge of this thing going from being another senseless crime to the latest in a definable Event. All we're missing is the final paradigm! The last equation that tells us who. Why is it cubicle-slave two and not cubicle-slave three? See? Look, either of you have a laptop with you?" 

"No," Mulder and Scully answered in unison. 

"I've got the ZipDisk in my car. It's an exact duplicate-I mean, it's got everything we need on it. Everything we have so far." 

"And you have no idea who commissioned this study?" Mulder jabbed. 

"No,. I mean, are they government or CIA? Or just some mega-Global Corporation that makes software or something? I don't know. We don't know. We know they have a butt-load of money, and a ton of clearance. I mean, these people can get us anything! Fuck, that's how we got into the crime scenes. Jacques and his seventy-dollar FBI-style haircuts." 

Mulder pulled the gate open and gestured with his gun for Grier to pass through. "You have any information on these people at your office?" 

"Yeah." 

"And you have computers at your office?" 

"Yeah, I..." Grier hesitated. "Oh, okay...yeah, I can get you in there tonight. That'll...I mean, this'll help when we make a plea-bargain, right?" 

"Let's see what you have for us first," Scully said. 

"Oh, I have everything...I have..." he stepped through and began walking toward the alley. 

"And for the record," Mulder said, tousling his hair. "SuperCuts. Thirteen bucks."   


12

**Wisconsin Avenue**   
**2:39AM**

_"Jesus...Aw God, No!"_

Mulder looked past the ZipDisk he was idly spinning in his fingers at the orange glow that suffused the horizon. 

"What? What's..." 

"That's our goddamned building! It's...the whole fucking thing! Thirty-five stories." 

Mulder felt something stab the pit of his stomach. They were still about a quarter mile away and he could see the flames vividly. The fire must be burning hotter than most. Hot enough to burn through any standard corporate safe or lock box. He pocketed the ZipDisk and reached down and unsnapped his holster. 

"Jesus, Mulder," Scully breathed from behind him. "Someone wants to shut this operation down." 

"I can't..." Grier's face went paler, and the sweat was beading into drops now. "All of them...Tim and Janine...Martha...they were working...I can't..." tears began flowing, his head dipped. 

"Grier, watch the road!" Mulder shouted. 

_"Look out!"_ Scully screamed from the back seat. Headlights blazed from the passenger side, loomed large. Grier stared at them, eyes glazed like a rabbit, Mulder made a grab for the wheel, but it was only an instant before the oncoming car smashed them in a low crunch of metal and plastic, a squeal of disintegrating tires, and the expansive hiss of front-and passenger-side airbags. Mulder felt himself get lost in a sea of cold plastic and CO2 mist. He was dimly aware of the safety glass of the windows and windshields crazing, then spiderwebbing into sculptures. 

Another impact on the driver's side ended their lateral motion and buried them under more plastic and airbags. Mulder struggled against his, found his gun and heard the low rattle of a submachine gun. 

The night became a hailstorm of shrapnel--plastic, plexiglass, metal-all lashing out to the vivid orange strobe of the muzzle-flash. All around him, he smelled blood and gunpowder. Footsteps clattered near his caved-in door. Mulder fired blindly, still entangled in the deflated airbag, heard his bullets rip through the thin aluminum and plastic and impact a body. He heard a surprised gurgle, the pitched vomiting of blood, and a body hit the pavement. 

The bolt of a submachine racked. 

Hands had his collar. Strong, uncompromising. He tried to lift his gun, but couldn't move it from where it was pointed at the door. 

_Where the hell was his attacker?_

The hands wrenched him upward, tearing him free of the plastic cocoon, twisting his arm in its socket. He yelped in pain. Felt his hand go numb and the Sig/Saur slip from his fingers. He saw night, backlit by the fire. An empty road and two demolished, smoking vehicles. The man holding him was positively lupine, with a long face and feral eyes beneath bristle-short hair. In his right hand was a Heckler and Koch MP5K cut-down submachine gun. Perfect to carry beneath a trench coat, yet still deliver the punch of its bigger brother which was used by police and special forces the world round-including the FBI's HRT. 

The wolven man managed a stiff smile, but hie eyes were unreadable. Mulder managed a glance to the side, and saw a listless body. Were the men close? Did this man want to see Mulder's eyes as he killed him? 

More footsteps. 

Mulder twisted again, saw another man pulling Scully through the car's rear passenger-side window. 

_"Let go of her!"_ he shouted uselessly. Then felt the cold touch of the submachine gun's big muzzle against his cheek. 

"Stop it, both of you! Stop it." 

The voice: flat, and flabby. Not a commanding voice, but an assured one. It jolted Mulder's nerves like a high-voltage shock. His head whipped around with such force his neck was stabbed with a lance of pain. 

The man was leaning almost casually against the front fender of a third car, its headlights cutting a wicket silhouette around him. His men stopped what they were doing at the sound of his voice, and he took the time to light a cigarette. 

"Goddamn it, what did you do, you tumorous son-of-a-bitch?" Mulder shouted. 

"Just turn over the disk, Agent Mulder, and we'll be on our way." 

"Why?" Scully called out, her chest heaving with exertion. Mulder hoped she hadn't suffered a concussion. "What's on it that you have to kill these people and burn down an entire office building?" 

"Hand it over," the man said evenly. "It's of no value to you, Fox. It won't help you find your sister. It doesn't even pertain to the X-Files." 

"You want it? I'll ram it down your cancer-ridden throat..." The gun's muzzle cut off the rest. 

"Stop!" the man ordered. "Let them go." 

The grip loosened, and Mulder crawled out of the window and onto the pavement, glittering with spent brass. He pulled himself to a standing position next to the wolf-like man with the machine gun-now pointed at his stomach. 

"Fox," the man was trying to sound reasonable. "We know it's not hidden. It never left the car. You either have it on your person, or it's still in the car. Either way, you don't have a bargaining chip. You can either hand it over or we can kill and find it anyway." The man paused to draw on his Morley. "Live or die. It's your choice." 

Mulder looked at Scully, saw in her eyes a reflection of what he felt: _They win this one...they win again..._

He handed to the ZipDisk over to the gunman. It was getting easier to lose, he mused as the man backed off and handed the disk over to the man behind the cigarette. "So..." Mulder called to him. "Tell me why. You commissioned the study, didn't you?" 

"We commissioned several," the man answered, "and they all found the same results." 

"All the same paradigm?" 

Another drag. The Morley's tip flared brilliant red, then, through smoke: "There is no paradigm, Agent Mulder. There is no type. No personality profile. It is the endgame." 

"The what?" 

Scully answered him, her voice flat. "The place where everything eventually ends up." 

"Human beings have never lived with one another harmoniously," the man explained on smoke. "There have always been wars and genocide. Burning the cities, raping the women and the like. Savagery. But what if humankind is, in fact, a savage? What if the base instincts to subjugate and destroy are so deeply ingrained that they cannot be removed or overridden? What if all the things we pester our leader for-safer streets, less crime, an end to international tensions-what if those things are the very stressors that are causing more and more people to respond to their mundane lives with acts of unimaginable violence?" 

Mulder tried to speak, but tasted only a dry mouth. He moved his tongue around to moisten it. "Is that what these studies have found? Civilization makes us insane? Peace and prosperity make us violent?" 

"They all lead to that point, yes. Peaceful coexistence may be the thing that ultimately tears society apart, Agent Mulder. Now, is that something you'd want the world to know?" 

Mulder said nothing. 

"Come on," the man said to his henchmen. They stowed the weapons and got into car. The man stood in the open doorway, half inside the car. "Until we meet again. Agent Mulder. Agent Scully." The door slammed, the car sped away. Sirens sounded, and the fire still glowed. 

"Mulder," Scully began, but never stopped. "Mulder, no single study or even a series of studies could render results that absolute. It'd have to be a massive undertaking. Thousands of interviews, years of detailed analysis-you're a psychiatrist. You know this." 

"Yeah, I know, Scully." Mulder managed, staring dimly at the orange-hued sky. "But it explains some things. It explains why they were so ready to turn it over to the alien colonists." He looked at her. "If they don't retake the planet, we'll destroy ourselves anyway. So what does it matter?" 

Scully said nothing. The comment hung between them like smoke.   


_[BACK...][1]_

   [1]: xfiles.html



End file.
